FFF Results Post #314 -- All Hail Steve Ditko!
On Friday, Steve Ditko's 85th birthday, CR readers were asked to "Name Five Favorite Comics Publications That Are Favorites For Featuring The Work Of Steve Ditko." This is how they responded.

1. The Amazing Spider-Man #33 (Marvel, '66) -- Everybody's going to pick this, due to the presence of maybe the most beloved superhero sequence of the entire Silver Age, but it speaks to the crazy raw appeal of those five or so pages that I tend to remember it as taking up 3/4 of the issue while Spidey cycles through the entire supporting cast, GOTTA DO IT FOR AUNT MAY, DO IT FOR FLASH, like Stan Lee basically scatting over panel after panel of prime Ditko agony, taken to the heights by the intensity of the visual storytelling - and it's *just that intense*, but without wasting time.
2. Mysterious Suspense #1 (Charlton, '68) -- My all-time favorite superhero comic, a perfect machine of two-fisted metaphor and the one thing you'd want to hand someone to show 'em what Ditko's all about, in the perfect world where it's readily in print. Talk about affronts to rationality.
3. Mr. A. (Comic Art Publishers, '73) -- The secret ingredient here is "when is a man to be judged evil?", possibly the most Jack T. Chick thing Ditko ever produced and proof positive that Mr. A. can love as hard as he can punch.
4. Ditko's World Featuring... Static #1 (Renegade, '86) - Because I always find it amusing that Ditko's attempt at a sophisticated, longform superhero graphic novel was already on publisher #3 (of 4) in the months directly preceding the Watchmen launch. I wonder if any kids pored through these back issues after flipping through Rorschach's journal and went "hey"? All-time great cover on this one.
5. Lazlo's Hammer (Robin Snyder, '92) -- Definitely the 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her of the Ditko oeuvre, and as succinct a statement of the man's perspective on art as you'll ever find. Now collected in the Avenging Mind phonebook, where it stands out so sharp the rest of the thing feels like a Criterion box set built around it.

I deleted with regret some entries that named more than five. I'm not so schoolmarm-ish that I feel the need to have everything as asked for, but once you start letting people color too far outside of the lines everyone wants to do it and I end up with a bunch of mad people.